As enrollment booms, schools lack room to grow

Georgia colleges and universities

Posted: Sunday, June 19, 2005

By Brandon LarrabeeMorris News Service

ATLANTA - At the Medical College of Georgia, a new cancer research facility is set to be finished by the first part of next year. A structure for the nursing and allied health sciences programs is being built. And more construction could be on the way.

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"We have two cranes up right now," said MCG President Daniel Rahn.

But, like other school heads around the state, Rahn also sees looming needs for his campus that the legislature should consider funding.

"If you find a president who says, 'This'll be enough,' I'll be stunned," Rahn said.

Across the University System of Georgia, colleges say they're cramped for space or working out of old buildings that don't fit their needs. A parade of presidents recently made the annual pilgrimage to Atlanta to press their case for new facilities before the University System Board of Regents. In many cases, the school chiefs hit the same refrain: Current buildings were too old, too dilapidated or too small for the coming onslaught of students that the system is set to absorb in the next decade or so.

Regents expanded the size of the list of projects they would send to legislators and said the Georgia General Assembly needs to come up with more funding for the buildings.

But the numbers are staggering. According to Regent Martin NeSmith, who chairs the board's real-estate committee, the most pressing needs of the university system total nearly $1.2 billion. All told, the state's colleges and universities need about $7 billion, system officials told the regents.

Some state officials say they want to do more.

"I would like to see it increase, considering what we're facing in the way of growth that's going to be coming into the system in the next 10, 15 years," said state Sen. Brian Kemp, R-Athens and chairman of the higher education subcommittee on the Senate's budget-writing panel.

But Kemp and others point out there are other state needs as well: Rapidly rising health-care costs are squeezing the Medicaid budget; the state is revamping its formula for funding elementary and secondary schools; and some lawmakers already are queasy about endangering the state's highly regarded bond rating.

"It's not just a matter of writing checks," Rahn said, pointing to the huge tab. "That would be unrealistic."

At the beginning of each summer, a select group of college presidents trek to Atlanta to plead their case for new buildings. This year, 14 projects were presented in the hopes that they would make a priority list the regents submit to the legislature each year to help guide lawmakers' spending decisions.

Last year, the legislature provided design funds for eight of the projects; no project got construction money.

The system hopes to get building funds for the designed projects next year, but that would require issuing more than $200 million in bonds.

NeSmith said the decisions about which projects to fund this year seemed more difficult to make.

"It was a lot more difficult trying to pick, in my opinion," he said. "The need was so big."

Some of the presidents, such as Savannah State chief Carlton Brown, pointed to buildings that still had asbestos. Kennesaw State President Betty Siegel said her school lacks enough space - 919,000 square feet - at a campus with less than 750,000 square feet to begin with.

Rahn told regents that the MCG School of Dentistry is housed in a building built in 1970 that isn't even equipped to handle the new dental equipment needed to teach students.

"We need more electrical capacity, and we also need more space for chairs," he said.

But the question facing the state is how to fund more projects despite nagging needs in other areas. A state bond package for the coming fiscal year that includes hundreds of millions of dollars in projects, from ports to roads to university building designs, made some lawmakers jittery in the session that ended in April.

Even so, NeSmith said a large bond package targeted at university construction wouldn't be a bad idea.

"We think that would be very wise," he said.

Rahn said he thought more cooperation was needed, including input from the regents, the state Department of Education and state officials.